Table Of ContentPower, Race, and Higher Education
TEACHING RACE AND ETHNICITY
Volume 5
Series Editor
Patricia Leavy
USA
International Editorial Board
Theodorea Regina Berry, Mercer University, USA
Owen Crankshaw, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Payi Linda Ford, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland, USA
Virinder Kalra, University of Manchester, UK
Marvin Lynn, Indiana University, USA
Nuria Rosich, Barcelona University (Emerita), Spain
Beverley Anne Yamamoto, Osaka University, Japan
Scope
The Teaching Race and Ethnicity series publishes monographs, anthologies and
reference books that deal centrally with race and/or ethnicity. The books are intended
to be used in undergraduate and graduate classes across the disciplines. The series
aims to promote social justice with an emphasis on multicultural, indigenous,
intersectionality and critical race perspectives.
Please email queries to the series editor at [email protected]
Power, Race, and Higher Education
A Cross-Cultural Parallel Narrative
Foreword by Laurel Richardson
Kakali Bhattacharya
Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA
and
Norman K. Gillen
Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, Texas, USA
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6300-733-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6300-734-4 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6300-735-1 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/
All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2016 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
POWER, RACE, AND HIGHER EDUCATION
“Riveting, courageous, innovative and brave! This spell-binding book not
only holds your attention, it holds you to account as you read a beautifully
integrated narrative that weaves theory, research, artistry and practice into
an utterly compelling positioning of our power relations within society and
the academy. PhD supervisors and candidates should use this book as a
springboard for pursuing deeply reflexive and risky research that will surely
be personally transformative and critical, all within a creative lenses.
Bhattacharya and Gillen have officially raised the bar on PhD research
practices. Never before have I read an account that brings together the parallel
narratives of a PhD supervisor working with a PhD candidate. A complex
research study steeped in Chicano feminism and cross-cultural theories of
engagement, pushes against privilege in ways that is often uncomfortable
yet arguably essential. Choosing a structure of parallel narratives that
employ script-like theatrical elements, Bhattacharya and Gillen masterfully
craft a woven story that gradually reveals an awakening of male White
privilege. Historically, the academy demands that we hold our research to
a high standard of reflexivity, where we not only document and research
the lives of others, but also interrogate our positionality and ourselves
within our research. Bhattacharya models this high standard with increasing
intentionality as Gillen progresses through his PhD. Practicing compassion
in those moments when Gillen wonders if he can go on, Bhattacharya
reframes her mentorship and encourages his next steps. To Gillen’s credit
he accepted his supervisor’s call to self-reflexivity ever more deeply over
time until his own awakening of positionality emerged. This book is a
gem! PhD supervisors and their students often share research interests, and
perhaps other professional interests, but seldom if ever take the immensely
courageous step of examining their concurrent positions through rigorous
theoretical practices and vigorous critically creative practices in a full length
manuscript. This work is at once rigorous and vigorous. It is the best of
what we all aspire to be in our PhD supervisor – student relationships and
within our qualitative research communities. It is an inspiration to me and
I am certain it will be an inspiration to others. May we all be so committed
to our artistry, pedagogy and scholarship that we risk revealing our deep
engagement as a process of personal interrogation considered through a
compassionate spirit.”
– Rita Irwin, Ph.D., Author of A Circle of Empowerment: Women,
Education, and Leadership, Professor of Art Education in the Department
of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Associate Dean of Teacher Education,
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada
“This book is filled with ghosts, of both the haunting and foreshadowing
kind. The ghosts are former teachers, family members, mentors and fellow
travellers. But there are also colonial ghosts, post-multicultural ghosts,
and borderland motherghost Gloria Anzaldúa, who sounds a call to action
throughout these pages.
Bhattacharya – a self-identified Brown woman – and Gillen – a self-
identified white man – come together not only in intercultural, narrative,
and pedagogical ways, but in political and personal ones too. Spanning the
fields of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, power, qualitative methods, and
arts-based research, this book pulses with heartful and insightful thoughts
for those interested in critical race and intercultural scholarship. It also,
wonderfully, offers just plain powerful and ready-to-go teaching exercises
that can be used by readers to start our own journeys of intercultural learning
and teaching in all our classrooms. Buy it now!”
– Anne Harris, Ph.D., Author of Creativity and Education, Faculty of
Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
“This is a great book. Bhattacharya and Gillen jointly retell their introspective
struggles with their professional and personal identities in this compelling
confessional tale. Power, Race, and Higher Education intimately explores
the sensitive and emotionally charged interpersonal dynamics between
a dissertation supervisor of color and her White male doctoral student
researching a Chicana’s life story. Through vulnerable personal narratives
and ethnodramatic scenes, the co-authors reveal their respective journeys in
academia with their sometimes challenging, yet always supportive, working
relationship. Told in honest and straightforward language, this engaging
book has much to say about scholarly responsibility, White privilege, and
our necessary reconciliation toward equity and a deep awareness of self.”
– Johnny Saldaña, Author of Ethnotheatre: Research From Page to Stage,
Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University
“I love this book! Writing with intellectual humility and great insight,
Kakali Bhattacharya and Kent Gillen use story, self-reflection, ethnodrama,
and other forms of dialogue to explore some of the most urgent questions
facing twenty-first-century educators: How do we build commonalities
without ignoring or sidestepping privilege, complicity, and other forms
of desconocimientos (willed ignorance)? How do we assist students from
a variety of backgrounds to self-reflect on the ways these backgrounds
have shaped them? How do we work with students whose worldviews and
life experiences are starkly different from our own? In short, how do we
effect transformation? Power, Race, and Higher Education offers intertwined
personal narratives, pedagogical suggestions, and deep reflection that
perform vital bridging work for educators, students, nepantleras, threshold
people, and other social-justice actors.”
– AnaLouise Keating, Ph.D., Author of Transformation Now: Toward
a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change, Professor & Doctoral Program
Director, Department of Multicultural Women’s & Gender Studies,
Texas Woman’s University
“In melding inquiry with creativity and critical consciousness, Drs.
Bhattacharya and Gillen share how their evolving professor-student
relationship developed into an innovative example of qualitative research.
In Power, Race, and Higher Education, the authors demonstrate what
is possible when academics, educators, and researchers confront their
biases and interrogate the histories and perspectives that shape their
identities. Bhattacharya and Gillen narrate their experiences of conducting
research and share how critical self-reflection can enhance the presentation
of stories of underrepresented communities. To their credit, they do not shy
away from difficult and complex questions related to race, power, privilege,
and representation. In confronting their personal life experiences, readers
are able to read first hand the messiness and nuance one must embrace when
designing research studies and delineating one’s research purpose, methods
and epistemological framework. It is a book that will inform scholarly
conversations with both undergraduate and graduate students, and influence
future qualitative researchers.”
– Enrique Alemán, Jr., Ph.D., Executive Producer and co-writer of
Stolen Education, A Documentary Film, Professor & Chair, Educational
Leadership & Policy Studies, University of Texas at San Antonio
“This book could not be more timely. In today’s cultural climate, in which the
festering wounds of oppression are breaking violently open, Bhattacharya
and Gillen invite all of us to interrogate our positions of difference. Through
critical exploration of personal narratives, the authors demonstrate the
complexities of addressing racism and colonization. There is nothing ‘easy’
about this work, which is well overdue. Yet they approach it with compassion
and mindfulness. I will be using this book in my own courses as a model to
delve into deeper conversations about the impact of power and privilege in
society.”
– Jessica Smartt-Guillon, Ph.D., Author of Writing Ethnography,
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Texas Women’s University
“Power, Race, and Higher Education is highly recommended for upper-
division and graduate classes as well as senior administrators in universities
and colleges because of its erudite exploration of how students and their
professors ‘do’ power in academic settings. The book very skillfully peels
off, layer-by-layer several things, including opaque films of socialization and
‘taken-for-granted’ narratives of everyday living, that obfuscate the nature,
existence, and inevitability of power exchanges between professors and
their students. The authors (one a white, male student and the other a brown,
female professor) adroitly reveal their respective ‘stand-points’ of power and
privilege, as well as their powerlessness and under-privilege. In so doing,
the reader is drawn into the authors’ respective spaces of power, and made
to participate, as it were, in their interrogation and deconstruction of the
systemic artifacts that have shaped the outcomes of their interactions with
each other. The book’s strategy of acknowledging the ‘anatomy of power’
but focusing, even ethno-dramatizing the ‘physiology of power’ and how it
is ‘done’ between a white, male student with ascribed-status privileges and a
brown, female professor with achieved-status privileges makes it even more
engaging and illuminating. Power, Race, and Higher Education is indeed a
primus inter pares.”
– Bilaye Benibo, Ph.D., Distinguished Faculty and Professor of Sociology,
Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
“Amazing in its brilliance, the book attempts to humanize the perplexing
themes of contemporary cross-cultural existence of our time. The authors
take us on a scholarly journey riddled with self-doubt, with joyful exuberanc-
es and utter dubiety in leading lives that intersect multiple identities, chaotic
flows of real and imaginative elucidations of being human in an enigmatic
and globalized world, work and life in a structured academic construct. We
traverse the broad areas of academic imagination through lenses of resistance
and adaptation, negotiation and celebration, and ultimately, that of survival
and overcoming. Fantastically rewarding for students and scholars who want
to immerse themselves in the very nature of inquiry that effectively leads to
empathy and understanding of human nature. I can’t wait to adopt this book
for my graduate Cultural Studies course.”
– Anantha S. Babbili, Ph.D., Former Provost and VPAA, Professor of
Communication, Media Studies and Global Leadership Texas A&M
University-Corpus Christi
